Seth Messenger : The Fermi Paradox

Sitting with his friends and colleagues in 1950, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, winner of the Nobel Prize and incidentally involved in the Manhattan project... is at the origin of a famous paradox that bears his name today and can be summed up in a simple question:

If there were extraterrestrial civilizations, their representatives should already be with us. Where are they?

Many hypotheses have been made to try to answer this paradox.

Perhaps the technological challenge to come to us is insurmountable? Given the prodigious progress made by our species in just two centuries, it is easy to understand that this first hypothesis does not hold if we consider the age of the universe. Namely, some ten billion years. It seems reasonable to think that this gives one species enough time at a time to invent a technology and then use it to explore the stars. Based on our own progress, one study estimates that a civilization with technological means similar to ours would only need ten million years to spread throughout the universe.

Some may also have thought that the probability of the appearance of life, let alone a life evolved enough to access technology, was so unlikely that humanity would in fact be the first civilization in the universe to be able to leave its planet for the stars.

But then again, the vastness of the universe and its age do not lean in favor of this hypothesis. We now know that our solar system is nothing special and that many planets with the conditions necessary for the appearance of an organic life form have already been detected by astronomers. And these are only the closest, the most visible with our means of observation still limited. Many meteorites collected on Earth also contain traces of extraterrestrial nucleic acids that are one of the elementary bricks of our DNA-based life form. And we can also cite here the case of the tardigrades that hide in the mosses of our roofs and some of which suspect an extraterrestrial origin.

But there's another hypothesis.

And I must admit that, in view of the human example, it takes on all its relevance: that of self-destruction.

Thus the species that would have preceded us simply would not have managed to pass this moment when their technology makes them as capable of destroying their environment as they are of self-annihilation...

Personally, I like to think that some intelligences have been able to defeat their own demons, but have chosen to remain invisible to us. Perhaps they are watching us millions of light years away, or are they reading in each of us right now, entangled in our destinies by means of technology so advanced that we are even unable to conceive it?

Yes, I like this idea of infinitely more advanced souls who observe us without intervening, respecting our free will and our nature. And silently hoping, in the heart of their wisdom, that we may finally continue our growth. . . .